Wednesday, December 24, 2008

This month, the Wendy's "Kids' Meal" comes with one of five different Peanuts toys (which also can be purchased separately). This week's toy (at least in my town) is the "Build Your Own Comic Strip" game.

It comes with a three slot 'picture frame' and six two-sided strips (a total of twelve three-panel strips). The instructions encourage you to break the perforated strips into separate panels and create your own Peanuts.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Was lucky to see Liquid Liquid play at Santos Party House the other week in New York. A longtime dream come true--amazingly incredible show. Even heard some unfamiliar songs which was a surprise. Someone put up a nice clip of Cavern from the set that night, posted here below:

Saturday, November 15, 2008

In 1940 Abner Dean was hired by United Features to do a cartoon similar to Grin and Bear It by George Lichty, who had recently left the syndicate. Dean’s gag panel, which he named Funny Side Up, followed the template of Lichty’s: a single-panel humor strip with no recurring characters, drawn in ink and shaded with crayon (a shading technique that Dean seldom used).In 1941 Dean wrote of the “ordeal” of creating over 300 Funny Side Up cartoons: “for the greater part of the last year I was doing a daily and Sunday feature. . . . It appeared in over a hundred papers, was a wonderful experience in discipline, but proved to be not sufficiently rewarding mentally to justify spending the next five years as its slave. After about ten months of a night and day routine I decided to abandon it and return to the work that syndication had forced me to leave.” “I’m still unsettled in my work,” he continued. “I’ve experimented a great deal and gone off on many tangents which justify themselves, but I haven’t yet found the balance between the well known economic structure of things and the work I want to do. I find time occasionally to paint and experiment in clay, but the demands of commercial art are so great and lead so far away from the purer forms that I don’t believe a compromise between the two is ever possible. Those who pretend it is are perhaps over-stating their validity in one or the other."

["It's funny . . . I can dance this way all night and my feet never get tired."]

["The senior class at Yale voted him 'most likely to succeed' . . . so who was I to stop him when he tried to kiss me!"]

["Wrap up the price tag . . . If she likes that I'll come back for the necklace!"]

To my knowledge, the above three cartoons have never been reprinted in any form - the one at the top of this post is the only reprint I have found. (I apologize for the microfilm quality of these images.) Dean is not know for this type of cartoon, but rather for the kind you can see here, which he published in book collections released after Funny Side Up.

Dean revived the Funny Side Up name for filler material in at least two United Features-owned comic books during 1943: Sparkler Comics and Tip Top Comics. It's nice to see Dean's work in color and on newsprint:

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

In his recent book on Steve Ditko, Blake Bell uses the above page as evidence of his claim that Ditko's late '90s work is characterized by a "positioning of characters [within a scene that] was static, with characters standing straight up in the same position from panel to panel" (167). But I think Bell's criticism is off; he looks at the figures, but does not take into account the many ways in which Ditko's figure placement and posture relate to the narrative.

In panels 2-5, the character Reck is at his parole hearing. The stiff, upright position of the figure in panel 2, flanked on the left by the parole board and the right by a prison guard, suggests Reck's outwardly submissive posture (with semi-clenched fists to suggest his internal tension) while standing in front of those who would determine his fate. Bell says that "characters are standing straight up in the same position," yet the 'camera' position and size of the figure change (as does how much of him is visible) from 2 to 3 to 4. And we would expect a prisoner at a crucial hearing to stand unusually still. What's of primary interest to Ditko seems to be the way the character's body and face reveal different things throughout the sequence. And he creates visual interest (the thing that Bell claims his later work lacks) in a number of ways, such as by waiting a panel to reveal the character's face and by moving closer to the subject in each consecutive panel.

The pairs of panels -- 2-3 and 5-6 -- are set up to mirror each other.

In the first pair, Reck is on the inside (in prison), in the second pair, the outside. In panel 2 and 5 Reck stands in the same position, as Bell notes, but the reason for this seems clear. The demeanor he takes in the hearing is initially the same as that he takes upon his release -- he has to face people on the outside for the first time in 20 years. Both panels suggest a kind of temporary paralysis that he feels in the presence of others. Here, as in 2, he is flanked by three people on his left (both panels feature 2 background men and 1 woman). In panel 6 Reck puts his hand on the train's window, and comments on the paradoxical symbolism of his situation: he is 'trapped' inside the train, but free from the bars of the prison. His dialogue in this panel ("But it's # better than behind bars") and the box of the window also refer us back to the bars of the prison gate in panel 1:

Note how the lines on the glass echo the direction of some of the bars.

And the images of a still Reck in panels 2-6 find their release in the last, and largest, panel of the page; now Reck is free and in motion:[And note the variety of postures of the characters in this panel: the different angles of their heads, the hand gestures; some people are standing, others are in motion . . .]

I think that Ditko sets this sequence up very carefully, and it's indicative of the fact that his storytelling and design/layout skills are clearly visible in the later work.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Yesterday, I mentioned that Kramers Ergot 7 was so big it was on both sides of the family, but did I also not mention that Ivan Brunetti's Anthology of Graphic Fiction Volume 2 set a blizzard on fire and threw typhus in prison? Kerrang called it "SKULL SHRIVELING MAYHEM...(BRUNETTI) BLEW OFF MY FUCKING FACE TO A PRIME INTEGER." Gladys Merriwether at Good Housekeeping noted that it was "Easier to tote than Comic Book Tattoo...(Provides) endless source material for scrapbooking and decoupage."Unfortunately, because I am in the book--full disclosure--and because the publicity department of Yale University Press may have indirectly requested blog entries, I suppose to create some sort of imaginary viral phenomenon, and because Mr. Brunetti himself may post on this blog, I may not be at liberty to tell you I find the book inspiring. Brunetti has a neurotic taxonomic associational sense that will draw a parallel between Naughty Pete and Ron Rege or between the washes of Ben Katchor and Frank Santoro. He's also able to parse a seriousness of purpose in Eugene Teal and Elinore Norflus. This is not 52 pickup, but a book I can imagine being taught in school, to which I can only exclaim, "Hooray!" and/or "Rats!"

Monday, November 10, 2008

Kramers Ergot 7, the book 9 inches smaller than the fist of Chuck Norris, will be celebrated at a release party at Family Books in Los Angeles this Sunday, November the 16th, at 7:00 pm. Alvin Buenaventura, Martin Cendreda, Matt Groening, Sammy Harkham, myself, Jaime Hernandez, Walt Holcombe, Geoff McFetridge, John Pham, Ron Rege, Johnny Ryan, Souther Salazar, Josh Simmons, and my parents will be in attendance.There will also be an exhibition featuring original art from the book.

Select an option: This book is so big when it was diagnosed with a flesh-eating disease, the doctor gave it ten years to live. This book is so big when it tripped on Fourth Avenue, it landed on Twelfth. This book is so big when it was walking down the street and I swerved to miss it, I ran out of gas. This book is so big when it goes in a restaurant it looks at the menu and says, “OK.”

Ivan Brunetti on “An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, Volume 2” from Yale University Press – Video director John Kuramoto brings together dozens of images from leading indie comics artists featured in the book, along with commentary by its editor, award-winning cartoonist Ivan Brunetti. For more info, click here.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Thursday, October 30, 2008

One thing that interests me about comics is the way that cartoonists use punctuation, especially within word balloons. Charles Schulz is particularly interesting in that his habits seem to change throughout the 50-year run of Peanuts. I can't say that I have read all of the strips, but in skimming through over a dozen collections from different decades to prepare this post I have noticed a few recurring practices and shifts relating to the use of the ellipsis. One thing I rarely see is a sentence that ends in a single period. His common practice is to use the edge of the word balloon as a kind of replacement for it:

Here's an exception from the early 70s:

Punctuation that would be normal for so many cartoonists, is strange for Schulz.
In the early years of the strip, he used some very unusual ellipses; sentences can end with as many as seven periods:Here's one with five: This practice, which often appears to be a design feature -- to make a balloon more visually balanced in some way (as above) -- doesn't seem to last too long. I could not locate many ellipses that go beyond four once we leave the early to mid-50s. {The seven period one above is also especially appropriate semantically,coming after the word "wait."}

A favorite form for Schulz is the two-period ellipsis. At first I thought this might be used only when space would not allow for a standard one -- but I quickly realized this isn't the case. From 1963: There are many such occasions when he could have fit in three. I wonder if the two-period ellipsis reads differently to him than one with three . . as a pause with a different meaning . . .
A few late-90s collections show a heavy use of the two period version, much more so than earlier strips do. Somehow this relates to the shaky line and minimalism of the later strips and may add, in a small way, to their strangeness: It's often a slight mystery to me why he made the choice that he did; and I can't think of another mainstream comic strip artist who takes an approach to the period/ellipsis quite like Schulz's.
His work is only one example of the ways that text in comics -- and especially in word balloons -- is liberated from the kinds of 'rules' that govern prose. It's a way that comics can be aligned with poetry, which shows far more openness and freedom with punctuation. Schulz, for example, almost never ends sentences with a period, a standard stop in essays, short stories, and novels (of course, he makes extensive use of ? and !). I tend to think of balloons as more like a blank page of poetry than a blank page of prose -- a place that's fairly wide open

Monday, October 20, 2008

I love seeing before-and-afters of pretty much anything. From New York City, to Dr. Zizmor's patients, and a well done, carefully shot before-and-after really makes my day. (I recently went out of my way to visit the Physical Graffiti buildings on St. Mark's place.)

I like them for the same reasons that I always loved Highlight's for Kids' spot-the-differences activity spreads. This series of photographs of Twin Peaks shooting locations is tops. Rarely do fans work so hard to get the correct camera position/lighting/composition to really observed the differences of a place. This one gets it right. I revel vicariously in the experience of a Twin Peaks fan, so dedicated, so unflinchingly geeky, wandering around what was the "Great Northern" lodge matching pine-knots to screen captures taken from their DVDs. Well done. All this nostalgia is making me hungry!

Now, I hope they head a little farther down the coast now and take some definitive before-and-afters of Astoria, OR and the principal Goonies locations. It's been done thoroughly, but the bar has been raised.

"Smoking is for Squares" (from The Atom #15 [Oct-Nov 1964]). Paulette Breen was awarded the title of Miss American Teenager in 1963. Here's a picture of her:She later appeared in a number of TV shows (Happy Days, Quincy, M.E., The Krofft Supershow {as Wonderbug}) and movies.